School Shootings This Year: How Many and Where

School shootings—terrifying to students, educators, parents, and communities—always reignite polarizing debates about gun rights and school safety. To bring context to these debates, Education Week journalists will track shootings on K-12 school property this year that result in firearm-related injuries or deaths. (About this tracker.)

Latest Situation

Law enforcement authorities said 10 people, most of them students, were killed and another 13 were wounded in a shooting at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, near Houston the morning of May 18. The shooter, a 17-year-old male student, was taken into custody, and authorities said a “person of interest” was also detained. Read more.

Injuries & Deaths

Where the Shootings Happened

Size of the dots correlates to the number of victims. Click on each dot for more information.

About the Shootings

About This Tracker

In the emotionally charged aftermath of school shootings, politicians, activists, news media, and ordinary citizens often cite statistics that can present a distorted view of how many of these incidents occur. Those statistics are used to fuel ongoing debates about gun control, arming teachers, and school security.

With this tracker, Education Week looks to provide a clear accounting of K-12 school shootings. There is no single right way of calculating numbers like this, and the human toll in the immediate aftermath and long term are impossible to measure. We hope only to provide reliable information to help inform discussions, debates, and paths forward until such reports are deemed unnecessary.

This page refers to incidents:

where a firearm was discharged

where any individual, other than the suspect or perpetrator, has a bullet wound resulting from the incident

that happen on K-12 school property or on a school bus

that occur while school is in session or during a school-sponsored event

Injuries include those reported by police and news media. They may be major or minor. While we only track incidents resulting in at least one bullet wound, total injuries are not necessarily the result of gunfire. The total count of those killed or injured does not include the suspect or perpetrator.

We will not track incidents in which the only shots fired were from an individual authorized to carry a gun, such as a school resource officer, and who did so in their official capacity. The numbers of incidents and victims reported in this tracker do not include suicides or self-inflicted injuries. While suicides and attempted suicides are serious issues of health and safety, many of the critical questions and debates that those incidents raise for educators and the broader public are distinct from those generated by school shootings.

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